The unicist approach to future research is based on knowing the nature of an environment that is found in its past and using the data of the present to infer the future based on the knowledge of the evolution laws.

The reach of one’s globalization is definedby the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

This approach is based on the fact that future and past are not symmetric. This is the case of all the environments that are evolving or involving. The past and the future are only symmetric in stagnated environments.

The Unicist Approach to Future Research is based on the research of the unicist ontogenetic intelligence of nature that started at the beginning of the 80’s. It was developed at The Unicist Research Institute.

It was a step by step discovery based on the apprehension of the nature of social phenomena entering afterwards in the institutional and individual evolution. Its integration with biology and physics was the final stage that was achieved.

The objective of the unicist approach to future research is to define a future scenario in order to adapt and influence it.

When an individual “looks back” at the history, the events that occurred are reasonable, understandable and logical. Therefore when approaching the future what is required is having the “logic” that is evident when analyzing the events of the past.

The building of future scenarios is based on the fact that the structure of the unicist ontology of a specific environment needs to be found in the past and that the facts of the present are used to infer the future.

The unicist approach to future research is based on inferring the future based on the laws of evolution established by the ontogenetic intelligence of nature, which allowed developing the unicist ontology of evolution.

This allows building reliable future scenarios.

The Unicist Ontology of Cultural Evolution

Introduction

The members of a culture that is evolving naturally accept that they might be involving. This concern is what avoids their involution.

The dominant ethics defines the evolution of a culture and defines its attitude towards influencing the environment. A culture is evolving when it has the capacity to adapt to the environment, meaning that it is able to influence it while it is being influenced.

This implies that the dominant cultural segments and the elite of the culture have a spontaneous attitude towards influencing the environment to generate growth.

As the habits of a culture evolve driven by the dominant ethics, an evolutionary culture evolves when the ethics of value adding prevails and the value earning ethics is the energy conservation function of the culture.

The synthesis

The driver of cultural evolution processes is the adaptation of a culture. This adaptation implies that a democratic attitude prevails, providing the necessary consensus to have social cohesion, being driven by a social efficiency, and making the necessary trade offs to maintain an efficient consensus.

The consensus of an evolutionary culture is oriented towards growth, which implies having a proactive attitude in the environment to generate value. Social efficiency means that the system is institutionalized having therefore a minimum level of entropy.

This institutionalization is materialized in the habits and in the myths and fallacious myths installed in a culture.

Trade-offs are implicitly conflicts and generate crises.

On the one hand, they can be evolution conflicts when they happen within the limits of efficiency and the value earning behavior. Or they can be involution conflicts, on the other hand, when the goal of these trade-offs is “buying” consensus.

In this case the culture enters a conjunctural involution which naturally eliminates the leaders that made this trade-offs if the value adding ethics prevails in the institutions.

If this is not the case, and a survivors’ ethics becomes necessary for the institutions, the culture will have entered into an over-adaptive behavior driving the culture towards involution.

The maximal strategy of evolutionary cultures is sustained by their value adding ethics.

This implies that the leaders of the dominant segments have a level of consciousness that allows them to be aware of the social processes and the long term consequences of the decisions that are made.

Social evolution requires participative processes within an authoritative environment that does not require the exertion of power to be efficient.

The catalyst of the evolution of a culture is given by the value earning behavior which includes a conscious value adding process.

This conscious value adding process is what accelerates the processes of the minimum strategy in order to sustain the adaptive behavior and the evolution of a culture.

The minimum strategy is based on a value earning behavior in order to ensure the wellbeing of a society.

The entropy inhibitor of this value earning process is given by the survivor ethics behavior of the members which ensures the wellbeing of the members of the society.

Levels of cultural evolution

The stability of the evolution of a culture depends on the attitudes of the culture. The spontaneous behaviors of the members of a culture are: Work driven behavior, Education driven behavior, Institution driven behavior, Technology driven behavior.

1) Work driven behavior

It is defined by the “purpose of life” of the members of a culture. Work driven cultures are those where pastime activities are only valid if the duties of work have been fulfilled. People feel guilt if they cannot do “their” work.

2) Education driven behavior

It includes a work driven attitude. The role of the members of a society depends on the educational level of its members. In this case, the central role of families, the introduction of the new generation in the society, is ensuring that they an education that allows them to overcome the level of their parents.

3) Institution driven behavior

It includes the education driven attitude. In these societies the behavior of the members is subordinated to the rules of institutions. Institutional behavior prevails over individualistic attitudes.

Freewill has the place established by institutional rules which have been established in a democratic way. The roles of the members are within the limits of the roles of the institutions.

4) Technology driven behavior

It includes the institutions driven attitude. As technology is the driver for growth, this requires that the members of the dominant segments of a culture need to be technology oriented.

This technology orientation implies seeking for new ways to produce more with less. This attitude fosters growth and drives towards permanent changes in order to upgrade the possibilities of a culture.

The capacity to generate or use innovative behaviors establishes the roles of the members of a culture. Democratic leaders are natural in this environment.

The Unicist Ontology of Social Mutation

The evolution of a biological entity is produced by “tiny” revolutions that produce small mutations that are integrated in the complex system generating the evolution or involution of this entity. Social environments also evolve based on small mutations.

A social mutation is produced when the functionality of a social entity has been lost, and there is the necessary available energy to generate a change. This can happen based on the persistence of social viruses type “A” that become chronic social diseases, generating a dysfunctional purpose that can be hardly limited by the exertion of power.

This chronic disease of an entity can be produced by inaction or by the continuous use of palliatives to neutralize its crises.

The mutation is produced by the appearance of a strange attractor that generates a change of the chaos, transforming it into a new and different functional behavior.

The strange attractor generates an unpredictable new order that exceeds the possibilities of the power to control it and mutates the existing chaotic credibility zone towards a different functionality. That is why mutations cannot occur in entities that are managed based on the exertion of absolute power.

This strange attractor disappears as such and evolves into an object as soon as the new credibility zone begins to exist.

This process can be understood by comparing, at the end of the first decade of the XXI Century, the evolution of the European Communist Countries and the evolution of Communist China.

Social strange attractors are social objects that have a lower ethics when the situation mutates towards a more instinctive and individualistic behavior.

Strange attractors generate evolution when they are objects that integrate a driver and catalyzing and gravitational aspects. In this case, they become fully unstable but conjuncturally functional, because catalysts and gravitational aspects cannot be part of a system.

It has to be considered that strange attractors disappear as such and are replaced by an object that is homologous to their driver as soon as the entity has mutated.

This new object generates the necessary complementary and supplementary functions in the environment using the energy generated by the dissolution of the original object.

The result of social mutations is unpredictable. All what can be predicted is the trend towards evolution or involution.

If this process includes the participation of change agents, they are excluded in the case of involutions and eliminated in the case of evolutions.

Strange attractors are defined by the change of the technology that sustains the ideology on which the social entity and its environment are based. The dysfunctionality of the existing technology is what generates the chaotic situation that requires the use of power in order to control it. The concept “technology” needs to be apprehended in the wide sense, meaning different ways, hard and soft, to improve the functionality of something.

The introduction of a new technology maximizes the existing chaos and generates the possibility of the appearance of the new strange attractor.

If the strange attractor does not appear, the chaotic entity explodes or implodes depending on the characteristics of the context. If it appears, the entity evolves or involves depending on the characteristics of the strange attractor.

Peter Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm. http://www.unicist.org/repo/#Unicist

The purpose of justice in a culture is to provide a safe environment to allow that roles fulfill their objectives within an institutionalized environment. In other words, the purpose of justice is to foster and inhibit the dysfunctional activities of institutionalized environments.

The reach of one’s globalization is defined by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

Justice can either work as the catalyst or as the entropy inhibitor of social behavior. Justice only exists as an external entity in a community and ensures the functionality of those institutions that allow the society to work as a system.

The concept of Justice does not refer to the judicial system of a culture. It includes all the individual, social and institutional actions that are developed to sustain the functionality of the system.

Justice is naturally driven by “common sense” which implicitly includes the values of the cultural archetype, the life-style and the moral of a culture. Justice works as a rigid framework that defines what is functional or dysfunctional in an environment.

Justice has two different roles that need to be integrated in order to sustain institutionalization: justice as a catalyst and justice as an inhibitor.

On the one hand, there is a catalyzing justice that has the responsibility of fostering the equality of opportunities that allow expanding the boundaries without endangering the institutionalization.

But, on the other hand justice has the role of inhibiting dysfunctional actions, which drives towards ensuring equal rights to all the members of a community. This avoids the entropy in institutions and establishes the framework to develop minimum strategies.

The Ontogenetic Map of Justice

The purpose of justice is to foster the existence of transcendent roles in a society in order to make institutionalization possible and avoid its corruption. An institution becomes corrupt when it needs to degrade the environment in order to profit from it.

Institutions are driven by transcendent goals. Therefore, the driver of justice is to confirm the achievement of the transcendent goals of a culture. These transcendent goals are included in the Constitution of a country.

This process is materialized when justice provides the framework to sustain the functionality of the country as a system. However, this is only possible if both the individual roles of the entities and the individuals of the culture are protected.

When the legal framework and the social and judicial system have solved these aspects, it becomes possible to deal with the active function of justice to provide equal opportunities for all.

The final purpose of justice is the fulfillment of the transcendent roles of a society and ensuring the functionality of society as a system. This is only possible if the individual roles have been assumed in order to make the institutionalization real.

It has to be considered that the judicial system of a society only punishes those aspects the society considers punishable.

The Maximal Strategy

The maximal strategy is given by the catalyzing justice of a culture that needs to provide equal opportunities for the members of a community.

Equal opportunities require the existence of a democratic environment that fosters cooperation. That is why justice is an essential part of democracy and democracy is the necessary environment for justice.

When the intention of ensuring equal opportunities has been confirmed, it becomes necessary to accept that there has to be a social repair to respond to the deviations produced by injustices in the real world. Therefore, social repairs need to be sustained by the judicial system in order to make them functional.

Equal opportunities become possible if they include the social repair for the dysfunctional actions that hindered the possibility of an individual or group to access such opportunities. Social repair needs to recognize the opportunities lost and not only the costs that were produced.

When social repair exists, it becomes possible to confirm the existence of social sanctions that sustain the equal opportunities. This implies that the society punishes those who limit others to achieve goals.

The catalyzing justice requires the existence of social sanctions for all those behaviors that endanger equal opportunities. These social sanctions sustain equal opportunities and are the catalyst for the existence of justice. In democratic environments legal justice does not sanction what is not sanctioned by society.

The Minimum Strategy

The equality of rights, as the purpose of the minimum strategy, needs to achieved in order to sustain the institutionalization of a society. This requires individual repair for all the dysfunctional actions an entity has suffered.

The individual repair has to fit into the limits of acceptance of a society. If it is below, it has no effect as a dissuasive object, but if it is above, it generates a “judicial profitable business” that produces paradoxical results in the judicial system.

The legal sanction is the entropy inhibitor of justice. Legal sanctions imply that they need to be in accordance with the dysfunctional behavior and its consequences. Legal sanctions are a way to punish actions and to dissuade their repetition.

The legal framework and its application establish the entropy inhibitor that avoids the corruption of the institutionalization of a culture. The entropy inhibitor is the basic price to be paid to ensure the functionality of justice.

The Types and Levels of Justice

We have synthesized the different levels of justice in four segments. These segments are:

Defensive Justice

Protective Justice

Social Justice

Adaptive Justice

Level 1) Defensive Justice

The first level of justice is the defensive justice that allows providing individual repair through the different alternatives the judicial system provides. This justice provides every member of the community with a defensive system to sustain the right the individual has according to the legal framework of the community. Defensive justice seeks individual repair in order to ensure that individuals have the right to recover part of the damages produced by someone’s dysfunctional behavior. Defensive justice allows individual to recover from unfair damages produced by third parties.

Level 2) Protective Justice

It includes level 1. The second level is the protective justice, which provides a framework that allows protecting individuals and entities from the dangers of the environment. Protective justice implies a legal framework to protect from direct actions or the collateral side effects of actions. Protective justice is simple to install when providing support for unprotected people, like children, but needs to include all the participants of a community in order to provide a safe environment to live in. It is based on providing protections for individuals to prevent the existence of dysfunctional behaviors. Protective justice is natural in the field of crimes but difficult to apply in civil and commercial affairs.

Level 3) Social Justice

It includes level 2. The third level implies the existence of social justice to exclude socially all the members who behave beyond the rules of a community. This justice exceeds the limits of the legal framework and deal with the acceptance of the social rules to limit the actions of individuals. Social justice implies both the existence of social sanctions and social repair to equilibrate the actions and ensure social institutionalization.

Social justice implies the existence of a social sanction produced by dysfunctional behaviors that have social consequences. It implies that the private damage is considered in terms of its social consequences in order to dissuade its repetition. Social justice implies considering the greater good when dealing with dysfunctional behaviors.

Level 4) Adaptive Justice

It includes level 3. The fourth level implies the existence of a justice that is able to interpret the spirit of laws and the spirit of a society in order to provide equal opportunities for all including the equality of rights. Adaptive justice is the justice that allows institutions to evolve towards a superior level by accepting and fostering behaviors that are beyond the standards of a culture but foster the expansion of the community. Adaptive justice implies paying the prices of individual felonies considering the greater good and the consequences in the environment. Adaptive justice implies considering the field of individual actions as part of social dysfunctional actions in order to find the better way to manage justice.

The objective of people in the Era of Participation is to find a better place in the world, conserve it, expand it and avoid losing it. This era changes the way people deal with others. It generated a major change of habits that gives access to influential roles to all those who feel that they have something to say and drives towards an increasing transparency of public and private actions.

The reach of one’s globalization is definedby the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

The unicist future research on the displacement of the “Era of Knowledge” by the “Era of Participation” was triggered by the need of knowing how to influence people in an adapted way. The notorious change in communication technologies, that gave most of the hidden villages in peripheral countries an access to the world, made evident that a new ideology was being introduced.

Which technologies have given birth to the Era of Participation?

The sharing capacity of Internet changed the world of communication in the field of work and of pastime activities. Although it began as a tool to work it evolved towards a tool to access and share.

Cell Phones (SMS – Short Message Service)

The communication and influential capacity of messages when they are used to share weaknesses transformed cell phones into a weapon to generate both adaptive and over-adaptive participation.

Facebook – Twitter (Social networks)

Social networks became the natural tool to be used by all the segments of participants (publicity driven, bragging driven, utopia driven, recognition driven, action driven). They made the building and managing of superficial relationships possible, which were not possible before.

Linkedin (Professional Networks)

Professional networks became a way to position individuals in hypothetical roles in order to make them become real personal roles. Their use is based on providing hope to the participants who want to find or improve their place in the world.

Consequences of this New Era:

The change of the depth of relationships making them basically superficial and based on fallacious myths

The increasing importance of the word of mouth communication to install ideas

The increase of the value of charismatic leadership and its dysfunctional counterpart: the “manipulative leadership”

The substitution of structural participation (institutions) by conjunctural participation

The loss of credibility of formal authorities and the empowerment of authoritative roles

The increase of egocentrism and the demand of permanent sensorial and materialistic stimuli

The installation of over-adaptive behaviors as a standard in the world

The existence of multi-minorities

The installation of active inaction as a standard in underdeveloped environments

The Increase of the Influence of Public Opinion

Public opinion became the central power in democratic countries. Public opinion is now driven by the new technologies that are available and tends to install a dualistic approach in cultures defined by those who accept something and those who oppose to it.

As public opinion is intuition driven, this conflict becomes extreme when untrue information or disinformation is used by the parts.

Public opinion has always integrated the structure of the governmental power integrated by the legislative power, the executive power and the judiciary power.

The role of the legislative power is that of the driver of maximal strategies. In this role, it needs to be compatible with the public opinion but at the same time foster expansion and equality of opportunities.

The executive power has two alternatives in this Era: covering both the needs of expansion and distribution or focusing on distribution becoming a populist government. The extreme situation occurs when Distributism prevails absolutely to sustain the power of the government itself.

The judiciary power equilibrates the conflict between the public opinion, the legislative power and the executive power.

In the Era of Participation, the direct influence of people in governmental decision becomes dominant.

The End of the Era of Knowledge

The Era of Knowledge implied that the access to personal and social evolution was basically sustained by the knowledge individuals had and was demonstrated by their credentials.

But the Era of Knowledge came to an end. An “ERA” is such when it establishes an imperceptible “gravitational force” that sustains the behavior of an environment.

It has to be considered that knowledge began being ruled by religions in order to avoid the deviation of human behavior from the moral rules, but became a value in itself with the appearance of the Industrial Era in the world.

The paradox is that industrialization empowered knowledge but at the end, the Era of Industrialization was exceeded by the Era of Knowledge. Nevertheless, knowledge is still an appendix of religions in pre-industrialized societies.

Internet opened a window that allowed making the access of knowledge massive. It expanded the use of data and information that gave access to any person who lives in a non-marginal environment.

Information can be defined as any data that can be transformed into a meaningful entity and thus can be stored in the long-term memory of an individual. Knowledge is such when the information one has can be used to produce something.

Google, as a concept, made the access to information basically free for everyone. The paradox is that people now have all the information they are willing to search but the value generation, which is based on knowledge, depends on the concepts they manage.

This explains why the open access to information did not produce a significant increase in productivity and quality of work.

Thus, the functionality of knowledge as a driver for personal evolution became fallacious. Education became a hygienic key; it was necessary to open doors but did not suffice to drive personal evolution and provide a meaningful place in the world.

The occurrence of economic crises in the world was the trigger to the end of the Era of Knowledge. Every economic crisis generates the lack of opportunities for many and the degradation of the ethical intelligence of a culture in order to survive. When crises are not cured, but only palliated, they plant the seed of the next crisis and the degradation of cultures continues.

A consequence of these crises is a growing individualism, which drives people to develop a surviving attitude that diminishes the generation of value and installs an unstable social environment.

Another consequence is the exclusion of youth, the newcomers in societies, diminishing their possibilities to find a social role to evolve.

These consequences gave birth to the Era of Participation, which can be synthesized in a shout:

“I need a better place in the world”

What is the Era of Participation?

The objective of participation is to find a better place in the world, conserve it, expand it and avoid losing it.

What needs to be established is the social role an individual looks for, which can imply a structural or an incidental positioning. It implies that there has to be an acceptance of the reference group the individual accepts as a rule maker.

This reference group can be real, virtual or super-natural. All what matters is that it has to exist in order to make a participative process possible. Without a superior reference group’s acceptance, there is no true place in the world and the participation degrades towards achieving a role of active or passive opposition.

The social role individuals fight for needs to have a belonging group where the individuals feel at home. Belonging groups are what make a place in the world safe. Therefore, participation implies fostering the existence of belonging groups who share similar utopias while they share the same weaknesses they need to cover.

The participation process becomes redundant when a place in the world, accepted by the reference groups and the belonging group, has been gained. However, as the satisfaction of needs generates new needs this is a never-ending process at an operational level. This process generates social evolution when individuals have a role in the world that allows them to evolve based on the value they add.

Adaptive Participation

Evolutionary participation requires beginning with a conscious adaptive process where the individual is looking for a place to be who s/he is. This makes the individual a differentiated person that needs to begin by participating through value adding actions (participation to do) while sustaining the identity of the role by having the necessary image that allows others to tag him/her properly (participation to appear).

Participation is only possible when the members who participate are able to recognize each other as part of the same group. In fundamentalist groups this tagging might include tattoos or similar timeless marks but in social groups individuals need to have the necessary “look & feel” in order to be tagged and recognized as members.

This appearance is extremely notorious in social and professional networks that establish the basics of the profile that need to be covered in order for the group to accept a possible member. That is why appearance, which is given by the personal brand or image, is the entropy inhibitor that makes expansive participation possible.

When the image has been positioned, the final objective of being a real member becomes possible.

Over-adaptive Participation

The apparent paradox is that over-adaptation is the minimum strategy. This requires an explanation. Adapting implies influencing while being influenced to achieve a goal, which in this case is to have a place in the world. Influencing is what we call adaptive participation and being influenced is what in this case is named over-adaptive participation.

Over-adaptiveness implies accepting the rules of the environment, which implies submission but beginning with a dominant participation in order to feel that one is not submitting but establishing the rules.

When the self-esteem has been conserved by this dominant participation, which mostly implies active inaction that allows judging the environment, an oppositional role becomes necessary to accept the rules of the game.

When individuals are able to feel superior by judging the environment, opposing to some aspects to preserve their self-esteem, then over-adaptive participation becomes functional. But, this functionality depends on its compatibility with the adaptive participation.

Segments of Participation

There are different segments or participants that need to be understood in order to deal with them. Accessing profiles and activities on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is very useful to identify the different segments, which are never pure but always have an implicit dominant trend that drives their participation.

Publicity Driven

Bragging Driven

Utopia Driven

Recognition Driven

Action Driven

Conclusions

Paradoxically, the Era of Participation implies a prevalence of observation over true participation. This implies that this Era will represent implicitly a battle between observers and participants.

Over-adaptive participation is based on an observational attitude while adaptive participation is based on the synergy of the members to produce something.

The preexisting Era of Knowledge will be included as a secondary driver during the next decades to sustain, on the one hand, those who participate to build and, on the other hand, to sustain those who participate to expose the implicit weaknesses of the adaptive participants.

This makes this period a battle and an integration of these two groups. Dualism will be the driver for the mass that over-adapts while integralism will be the driver for the elites who adopt an adaptive participative approach. It is a battle of communication.

Adaptive Participation Building

The building of adaptive participation is the responsibility of the elite of cultures. It is an institutional role that needs to exist in order to make participative behavior meaningful.

The purpose of adaptive participation building is to establish an influential social capital. Social capital is given by the strengths of the bonds among the members of a group or community that drive their value generating actions. Social capital implicitly implies the existence of a greater good to sustain the relationships among the members.

Adaptive participation requires the existence of a double ethical behavior in the community. On the one hand, there has to exist an internal ethics of the group which needs to be based on cooperativeness and, on the other hand, an external ethics with the environment is required, which needs to be driven by competitiveness in order to ensure survival.

This is evident in the behavior of countries that naturally have two different attitudes: one towards the environment and another towards the members of the culture. However, both ethics need to be integrated by a social capital, which establishes the participation rules for the members of the group towards other members and towards the environment.

If cooperation is replaced by competition among the members of a group or community, the social capital becomes corrupt and over-adaptiveness replaces adaptiveness.

Corruption and over-adaptiveness also prevails when competition is based on the destruction of the environment in order to take advantage of it.

Adaptiveness drives towards evolution and over-adaptiveness is the cause and consequence of involution.

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm.http://www.unicist.org/turi.pdf

Cultures that have a strong drive towards growth cannot accept the defeat of their leaders. The elite of the culture needs to represent the values of the archetype.

The purpose of the maximal strategy of the Japanese culture is the expansion of the community based on the members’ pride for their work and sustained by their collective intelligence as a community or group.

Collective intelligence is in Japan the catalyst of their growth. Therefore there is a need for integrating the values of the community in order to be able to exert collective intelligence.

Individual intelligence is the entropy inhibitor of the Japanese archetype. It allows individuals to adapt to the conditions of the situation in order to achieve growth.

Loyalty is the final purpose of the minimum strategy. This means that individuals who are not loyal to the structure of the society are considered as aliens.

The integration of aliens implies a very slow process in order to avoid the loss of the roots of the culture.

Strong cultures as Japan respect foreigners based on their values and deeds. Dealing with Japan as an outsider is easy if one accepts that one is a foreigner. Respecting its archetype is the first step to deal with the Japanese community.

The reach of one’s globalization is defined by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

The ethics of democracy is what introduces democratic behavior into the habits of a community.

It has to be considered that there exist no democracies in environments that are not driven by democratic habits.

This ethics is integrated by:

Conceptual democracy, which drives towards building a strong social capital.

Systemic democracy, which sustains the effectiveness of democratic actions.

People driven democracy, which is based on the efficacy of the participants.

The Ontogenetic Map of the Ethics of Democracy

The purpose of conceptual democracy is to live is an evolutionary vital space that provides an identity to the members.

This vital space is implicit in the archetype of a culture or institution. It is materialized in the social capital of a culture that empowers the relationships among the members building a growing synergy of actions.

It implies an alternation of the leadership in order to ensure that the institutional aspects prevail over personal beliefs and that the democracy does not degrade into authoritarianism or an anarchic authoritarianism.

The Maximal Strategy

The maximal strategy is based on a systemic democratic approach, which needs, at a first stage, the true commitment with consensus.

This requires that the environment have the necessary culture to develop a functional consensus that is not driven by manipulation.

After there is a true trend towards consensus, the effectiveness of actions needs to be promoted. This implies that democracy needs to have qualified “politicians” and an adequate organization of the State in order to provide the required effectiveness of actions.

The lack of effectiveness is what generates democratic alternation, but when the lack of effectiveness is structural, the culture evolves towards an anarchic authoritarianism.

Systemic democracy is sustained by the development of catalytic trade-offs that allow ensuring consensus while accelerating processes to empower effectiveness.

These trade-offs are the catalyst of the ethics of democracy. The building of catalytic trade-offs is the core activity of politicians, which requires having the knowledge of what is happening in an environment and what is possible to be achieved.

When the catalyst has been installed consensus becomes meaningful and the systemic democracy works and evolves.

The Minimum Strategy

The minimum strategy is supported by the efficacy of people to manage the evolution conflicts that are implicit in democracy. It begins with the acceptance of the need to deal with evolution conflicts in order to manage the adaptation process.

Once this has been accepted, the minimum strategy is based on the efficacy of people, which includes both the leaders and the participants.

“Efficacy” in a culture implies the functionality of the concept of “work”, the concept of “knowledge” and the concept of “justice” in order to foster equal opportunities for all.

This unavoidably generates evolution conflicts. These evolution conflicts, which are complementation conflicts, naturally generate collateral involution and power conflicts. This requires making entropy inhibiting trade-offs in order to avoid that the culture degrade into an environment where zero-sum confrontations prevail.

The adaptiveness of conceptual democracy has been assured when the evolution conflicts can be managed, and the ethics provides the rules for an evolutionary democracy.

Types and Levels of Ethics of Democracy

Five levels of democracy can be conceptually defined:

Individualistic democracy

Belonging group-based democracy

Elite-based democracy

Integration-based democracy

Adaptive democracy

First Level: Individualistic democracy

Individualistic democracy is based on the satisfaction of the materialistic needs of the participants. This democracy is individual leaders driven, because people do not rely on institutions. It is implicitly a submissive democracy, where the consensus exists when the materialistic needs are satisfied and, when not, individualists become opposers. Submissiveness is complemented with dominant attitudes where the individual needs of participants prevail over the common good.

Second Level: Belonging group-based democracy

The second level includes the first level, which implies that the individual needs are covered, but based on the limits established by the rules of the groups where individuals belong. This is the case, for example, of multi-minorities democracies where the consensus is based on the differentiated characteristics of each group. This level of democracy implies an adherence based democracy and the existence of the needs of individuals to belong to a group in order to participate and have a place in the community.

Third Level: Elite-based democracy

The third level includes the second level but includes the acceptance of reference groups, which lead a society. This elite-based democracy allows expanding the boundaries of the belonging group and is materialized in a debate-based democracy.

The core of the functionality of this level of ethics is that the different elite groups be within the limits of the evolution conflicts required to develop democracy but that the distance between the positions of such groups be narrow enough to avoid the annulment of each other in case of democratic alternation.

The existence of elites ensures the necessary stability given by an accepted establishment.

Fourth Level: Integration-based democracy

The fourth level includes the third level but also includes institutionalization as a driver towards evolution. The integration-based democracy implies an institutionalization that structures the integration. Institutions filter the incompatibilities and permit a smooth evolution towards effective consensus. This level is the most mature level of democracy and requires a fully functional justice in order to avoid that people behave beyond the limits of a democratic system. The institutions need to have transcendent goals in order to make this level work adequately

Fifth Level: Adaptive democracy

Adaptive democracy implies the integration of the four preceding levels according to the context of the members and the situation. It is a way to manage democracy fostering all its levels based on the archetypes of the individuals and institutions within the archetype of the country. It makes the different levels compatible in order to achieve the goals implicit in the archetype of the culture.

The Double Ethics of Countries and Institutions

Countries and institutions need to have two different ethical approaches in order to expand.

A cooperative ethics to deal with domestic relationships.

A competitive ethics to deal with third parties.

1) Cooperation, the Driver of Democracy

It has to be considered that democracy is a social system for adapted environments. All environments have adapted and over-adapted aspects, but the prevalence of adaptation is a condition for the evolution of democratic environments. Over-adaptation drives naturally towards dominance, submission and opposition, which hinder the existence of a democratic context.

The driver of a democratic system is the existence of cooperation among the members of the society, culture or institution.

Cooperation building is the driver of democracy. This implies that cooperation is basic to build an evolutionary democratic environment.

2) Competition is the Driver of the Relationships with the Environment

While cooperation is the driver for domestic activities, competition is the driver for those activities that countries or institutions develop beyond the boundaries of their entity. This needs to be understood in order to accept that all countries and institutions have two different ethics.

A cooperative ethics is used to deal with the domestic aspects and, on the other hand, a competitive ethics drives the external aspects. This is basic to allow the expansion of the wellbeing of cultures and needs to be accepted in order understand that democracy is not a magic solution for universal problems.

International relations become expansive when they are managed within the limits of sustainable globalization, which allows integrating the interests of the parts involved.

“Je suis Charlie” has triggered a turning point in Europe and perhaps in the world.

Humor is an art that fosters personal and social balance. It builds a bridge to solve the conflict between idealism and realism.

By using an aesthetic communication, humor demystifies reality and establishes a conflict with the authority that embodies the values of the reality that is being idealized.

Illegitimate humor, anti-humor, is a communication that seeks the destruction of transcendent values of the environment that cannot be accepted.

It generates an unbalance of reality that produces extreme conflictive reactions.

Part 1 – Humor as a Driver of Social Evolution

Published: January 9, 2015

“Je suis Charlie” represents the need of people to accept humor as an art that fosters evolution. The unicist ontological approach to humor gives access to its concept and allows understanding its importance.

Humor is one of the mechanisms used by human beings to solve their adaptation to reality.

On the one hand, humor seeks to solve the conflict between the ideals an individual has and the reality s/he needs to deal with, and on the other hand, it provides a mechanism to allow individuals to integrate in groups.

“People are separated by their strengths and integrated by their weaknesses.”

Humor is a mechanism that allows projecting one’s weaknesses outside and integrating all kinds of people including those who belong to different social or cultural groups.

Humor is a way to solve individual or social problems

Laughing at oneself is a way to solve one’s problems or to manage them. It fosters functional behavior.

The Functional Concept of Humor

Humor is a human behavior that poses or tries to solve authority conflicts using an aesthetic demystification of reality.

About Authority Conflicts

Humor solves the authority conflict demystifying reality. This demystification seeks to establish a superior reality in which the individual assumes the role of a judge of the environment.

This demystification generates a high level of influential power and thus humor achieves the goal of empowering the people who use it. This demystification requires building smart fallacies to make people feel superior.

The authority conflict requires also annulling the ideal proposed by the authority, which is frequently done by the use of sophisms. This annulment of an ideal, implicit in the authority conflict, does not need to be harmonic.

Finally, the authority conflict implies developing a power game against the establishment, which basically covers all aspects that deal with human relationships. In this context, humor produces paradoxical results when dealing with religious faith.

About the Aesthetics

Humor can only exist when it is perceived as “aesthetic”, which means that people want to appropriate it in order to use it. A joke really works when the individual who learned about it uses it in her/his environment.

Humor also needs to be harmonic with the environment where it works. This is the case of each of the different types of humor, such as caricatures, jokes, the use of irony, etc., which require the adequate harmony with the environment in order to be accepted.

This harmony is defined by the culture, the moment, the group or the subjects involved. Rejection is the consequence of a humor that is not harmonic with its context.

About Demystification

Demystification is a power game. It seeks the destruction of those elements that bother an individual and thus fosters self-esteem. This power game opens two possibilities.

On the one hand, humor demystification allows solving the problem the individual has when dealing with a specific reality and, on the other hand, it allows individuals to avoid the need of assuming responsibilities in the environment.

Demystification needs to annul the influence an ideal exerts in an environment. When an ideal requires investing a high level of energy and is dysfunctional to the needs of a group, humor allows mitigating the stress produced.

Part 2 – Structural Segments of Humor

Three functions of humor could be defined:

The expansive humor that fosters the expansion of individuals or cultures.

The inhibiting humor that pretends to eliminate threats. It is a typical humor in authoritarian environments.

Anti-humor that seeks for the destruction of the transcendent values of individuals. The destructive humor needs to destroy a specific reality.

It has to be considered that there is a legitimate humor and an illegitimate humor. As humor drives an authority conflict, it is only legitimate when those who have been attacked are able to respond to the message through their actions. Therefore, humor becomes illegitimate when it attacks supernatural aspects that deal with religious faith.

Five structural segments of humor have been defined that characterize its influence in an environment. These functional segments include all the types of humor that exist. These segments are:

Aggressive Humor

Mordacious Humor

Projective Humor

Introjective Humor

Desacralizing Humor

Segments of Inhibiting Humor

The purpose of inhibiting humor is to destroy threats. These threats might be real or be part of a parallel reality of an individual. This humor is natural in environments where people feel submitted. It relieves the pressure produced by the need to over-adapt to an environment. It generates smiles.

The Aggressive Humor

The purpose of the aggressive humor is the destruction of a specific reality that is annoying a person or group. This type of humor might be subtle or violent but, in all the cases, it aims at the destruction of some aspects of the environment.

It exposes the weaknesses of a given aspects of reality making it appear as fully dysfunctional, which provokes smiles or laughter that disqualifies the aspects that are bothering.

This type of humor is functional to sectarian groups or extremely individualistic or marginal cultures.

The Mordacious Humor

It is the humor that seeks for the destruction of someone’s self-esteem or authoritative role. It uses subtle communication, including subliminal communication, and is built upon well disguised fallacies that allow installing fallacious perceptions.

It seeks to annul authoritative roles by attacking their implicit weaknesses, which sustain their strengths, destroying their legitimacy while creating the sensation of a superior intellectuality of the one who acts this mordacity out. This humor is functional among intellectual groups and inaction driven cultures.

Segments of Expansive Humor

The purpose of expansive humor is to solve the conflict between idealism and realism in order to better adapt to the environment. It is the humor that fosters personal and social evolution and generates smiles and laughter.

The Projective Humor

This humor allows individuals to project outside the personal problems they have to avoid having the need to adapt to the environment. It is the typical humor of bestselling comedies in theatres or movies.

The spectator shares the weaknesses acted out in the comedy, which liberate the spectator, who avoids the need to face the conflicts they generate in the real life. The projective humor is the best bridge to build social relationships.

The projective humor allows individuals to share their weaknesses, which allow building transitory relationships even between people who belong to different cultures or segments. It is the humor needed to participate in social events.

The Introjective Humor

It is the humor an individual uses to laugh at her/himself. It is a humor for the few and it is something that can be taken but not given. This means that the same humor that is perceived as projective by someone is used to laugh at her/himself by others.

It is a humor that cannot be perceived by those who cannot laugh at themselves. It is a typical humor of “doers” and groups who foster awareness. It doesn’t allow building bridges with others because it separates those who can laugh at themselves and those who cannot.

It has en extreme value for personal evolution and it also has a social value in those environments where “doing” is a dominant value.

Anti-humor (Illegitimate Humor)

It is the anti-concept of humor that seeks for the destruction of the transcendent values of a culture. It uses an apparent direct aesthetics, which works only when it includes subliminal communication, to install fallacious myths to destroy transcendent values. The anti-humor generates meaningless extreme conflicts. It is the humor used by fundamentalists. It generates rational adherence.

Desacralizing Humor

It is the humor that aims at the destruction of transcendent values that threaten the values of the one who is creating it. It pretends to establish an authority conflict with sacred institutions or aspects that deal with the faith of people. It is the kind of humor used by all types of fundamentalists.

Conclusion

The category of a humorous communication can only be measured by the reaction of those who receive it. Humor, like art in general, is a pathway to equilibrate the conflicts between individuals and society, which fosters a more functional adaptive behavior.

It also works as an internal equilibrator for an individual that has significant consequences on her/his personal health. The natural type of humor a culture uses is an indicator of its archetype.

On the one hand, humor is also used to destroy dysfunctional taboos, but produces paradoxical results when these taboos sustain the survival of a group or community. But, on the other hand, humor fosters personal evolution when it is used to eliminate growth taboos.

While humor generates the solution of problems, anti-humor is a fundamentalist action that generates extreme conflicts by fostering a parallel reality.

Since humor is an art, the development of humorous messages, includes a high level of non-conscious influences. The different categories of expansive, inhibiting, or illegitimate humor can only be confirmed through the reactions of the people.

This is an excerpt of the book on the Unicist Ontology of Humor published in 2004.

“Je suis Charlie” represents the need of people to accept humor as an art that fosters evolution. The unicist ontological approach to humor gives access to its concept and allows understanding its importance.

The reach of one’s globalization is defined by the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

Humor is one of the mechanisms used by human beings to solve their adaptation to reality.

On the one hand, humor seeks to solve the conflict between the ideals an individual has and the reality s/he needs to deal with, and on the other hand, it provides a mechanism to allow individuals to integrate in groups.

“People are separated by their strengths and integrated by their weaknesses.”

Humor is a mechanism that allows projecting one’s weaknesses outside and integrating all kinds of people including those who belong to different social or cultural groups.

Humor is a way to solve individual or social problems.

Laughing at oneself is a way to solve one’s problems or to manage them. It fosters functional behavior.

The Functional Concept of Humor

Humor is a human behavior that poses or tries to solve authority conflicts using an aesthetic demystification of reality.

About Authority Conflicts

Humor solves the authority conflict demystifying reality. This demystification seeks to establish a superior reality in which the individual assumes the role of a judge of the environment.

This demystification generates a high level of influential power and thus humor achieves the goal of empowering the people who use it. This demystification requires building smart fallacies to make people feel superior.

The authority conflict requires also annulling the ideal proposed by the authority, which is frequently done by the use of sophisms. This annulment of an ideal, implicit in the authority conflict, does not need to be harmonic.

Finally, the authority conflict implies developing a power game against the establishment, which basically covers all aspects that deal with human relationships. In this context, humor produces paradoxical results when dealing with religious faith.

About the Aesthetics

Humor can only exist when it is perceived as “aesthetic”, which means that people want to appropriate it in order to use it. A joke really works when the individual who learned about it uses it in her/his environment.

Humor also needs to be harmonic with the environment where it works. This is the case of each of the different types of humor, such as caricatures, jokes, the use of irony, etc., which require the adequate harmony with the environment in order to be accepted.

This harmony is defined by the culture, the moment, the group or the subjects involved. Rejection is the consequence of a humor that is not harmonic with its context.

About Demystification

Demystification is a power game. It seeks the destruction of those elements that bother an individual and thus fosters self-esteem. This power game opens two possibilities.

On the one hand, humor demystification allows solving the problem the individual has when dealing with a specific reality and, on the other hand, it allows individuals to avoid the need of assuming responsibilities in the environment.

Demystification needs to annul the influence an ideal exerts in an environment. When an ideal requires investing a high level of energy and is dysfunctional to the needs of a group, humor allows mitigating the stress produced.

Conclusion

Humor, like art in general, is a pathway to equilibrate the conflicts between individuals and a society, which fosters a more functional adaptive behavior. It also works as an internal equilibrator for an individual that has significant consequences on her/his personal health.

On the one hand, humor is also used to destroy dysfunctional taboos, but produces paradoxical results when these taboos sustain the survival of a group or community. But on the other hand, humor fosters personal evolution when it is used to eliminate growth taboos.

This is an excerpt of the book on the Unicist Ontology of Humor published in 2004.

A research to develop the trends on how the In-company Superior Education will evolve has been launched in order to be finished before Fall/2015.

An extreme change has happened in this segment.

It was triggered by the evolution of IT and communication technologies that are leaving aside the solutions that have been used during the last 50 years dealing with a person to person, blackboard driven (metaphor) educational approach.

A Think Tank has been organized in order to integrate participants from all over the world in order to develop a future scenario that includes the characteristics of the different cultures.

Participants are being selected based on the limits established by the 70 countries on which The Unicist Research Institute has the necessary archetypical information.

The inputs for this research are the future scenarios for Superior Education and Virtual Collaboration that have been developed. You can access the conclusions here.

10-year Scenario for Superior Education

The unicist logical approach allows driving businesses to the next level increasing their adaptiveness and speed of actions to improve results measured in growth and profits.

This implies that the superior education has to move from the “know how” approach to the inclusion of the “know why” as a driver of learning processes.

It has to be considered that there are cultures where the question “why” is socially non-acceptable because it provides full transparency, that defines the limits of an individual’s influencing capacity. In these cultures superior education is, from now on, a question of status and not of knowledge.

It also has to be considered that adaptiveness implies, besides reacting, forecasting the future and also influencing it. But in some cultures the future is a “taboo” which makes the acceptance of the credibility of reliable future scenarios impossible.

As these cultures are natural followers, their superior education cannot include aspects that deal with adaptiveness. This implies that the next step that has been defined is only applicable to cultures that accept their capacity to influence the future in an adapted way.

Anyway and anyhow this change process will demand decades and will be catalyzed by the individual initiatives of institutions and corporations that decide to make it on their own.

The 10-year Scenario for Virtual Collaboration

Virtual collaboration is the natural way to organize when there is a need of expert knowledge. Nowadays expert knowledge can be integrated in most of the cases by using the IT technologies that allow sharing data and images.

The time saving and productivity increase is significant when the conditions for virtual collaboration are given. It allows providing full synchronicity with the needs of customers and clients.

But there are several requirements for virtual collaboration to be implemented:

Virtual collaboration needs transparency of work become part of the culture of an organization.

It needs reliability systems that monitor work processes.

It requires customer orientation that fosters fulfillment, synchronicity and reliability.

Personal roles need to be complemented by quality assurance processes to ensure results.

The power of a culture is given by its archetype, the value of work and the technology that is being developed to generate growth. The Archetype of the USA is a paradigmatic example of how a culture can be leading in the world while strengthening its identity.

The reach of one’s globalization is definedby the limit of the pronoun “WE”…

The nature of the culture of the US, which is defined by its archetype, can be described by the propensity to develop audacious actions in the environment based on the necessary use of knowledge in order to achieve its “dream” within a credibility context.

And this has to happen within the “system” that provides the limits of the actions.

The Maximal strategy implies that the culture is driven by daring actions to achieve its cultural “dream” within an institutionalized context.

The catalyst of the evolution of the American archetype is its institutionalization that accelerates its evolution.

Institutionalization is materialized in the democratic rules of the society. The icon of the cultural dream is the American Flag.

Daring implies doing in terms of concrete operational actions to achieve growth and surpass the well-being achieved by the preceding generations.

The social pressure towards growth within a context of being a leading culture in the world generates uncertainty in the coming generations that fosters the need for addictions to avoid the responsibility to produce growth.

The minimum strategy of the archetype fosters thinking, driven by the personal objectives and within the limits of the personal credibility.

That is why the USA archetype includes a multi-minority approach.

This minimum strategy provides the necessary context to develop hard technologies that sustain the economic activities of the maximal strategy.

Personal credibility is the entropy inhibitor of the American archetype.

As wealth sustains the perception of security, personal credibility requires having solved the necessary financial situation that makes an individual credible.

Daring, dreaming, credibility and thinking integrated to achieve growth require a strong ethical environment that needs to be sustained by the judiciary system.

Lying is unacceptable because it destroys the credibility and transparency of the archetype.

Understanding and respecting the archetype of the USA is extremely useful to develop global and local businesses.

Peter Belohlavek

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using the unicist logical approach in complexity science research and became a private global decentralized leading research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. It has an academic arm and a business arm. http://www.unicist.org/repo/index.php#Unicist

Social critical mass is defined as the minimal amount of focused energy necessary to trigger a planned social phenomenon. Objects need to have the necessary critical mass to produce the value added to the process they participate in.

Its ontogenetic map is defined by extreme aesthetics, extreme influence and extreme credibility to provide the energy to produce results. Any social action requires having the necessary critical mass to produce the predefined results. Action without results is just unnecessary movement.

Critical mass is a basic condition for any social object, including the business objects. The final driver of SCM is the generation of an expansion process. It implies having an extreme aesthetics which is defined by the need to complete the essential needs of the participants of a social phenomenon.

This requires having the knowledge of the ontogenetic map of the phenomenon in order to be able to define the desirable aspects that need to be completed and the harmony that needs to be designed in order to generate an extremely aesthetic value.

Completing implies covering an explicit need. That is why completing requires having an extreme influence in order to be accepted.

Extreme influence implies having a complementation driven influence which integrates both cooperation and competition. Extreme influence requires establishing a complementation driven bond which includes both functional and personal aspects.

Extreme aesthetics can only be accepted with an environment of extreme credibility. That is why the credibility is the complement of aesthetics. Extreme credibility is an optimism based relationship.

Optimism makes people believe that what is possible will occur and that the validity of the process has been proven. Without optimism there can exist no social critical mass. Optimism is extremely far away from mania.

Social Critical Mass can be achieved when there is the necessary conceptual aesthetic, the complementation driven influence and the necessary social optimism.

NOTE: The Unicist Research Institute was the pioneer in using a logical approach to deal with evolution and became a private global decentralized world-class research organization in the field of human adaptive systems. http://www.unicist.org